Earth Tones

I'm a primary-colors sort of person, drawn to kitchens done in black and white with splashes of red or bright blue. We, however, have a Craftsman-style old house, complete with original wall stencils, and so decided to stick with earth tones to reinforce the "in harmony with nature" feel of the building. Somewhat to my surprise, then, I'm comfortably ensconced in muted olives and forest greens, rich browns, dusky oranges. It's all good, except for one eensy-teensy detail:

Cat poo comes in earth tones.

Cat poo, therefore, blends in perfectly--is, in fact, indistinguishable, even invisible, when resting on our rugs and even wood floors.

This has become A Problem.

Our once shy but affectionate and completely litter-box oriented kitty has taken to pooping all over the house. Because we can't figure out what's wrong, I now call her Menopausal Kitty--I figure I blame everything weird about my physical, mental, and emotional states on menopause, so why not the kitty, too?

Meanwhile, I'm adapting. Evolving, really. I now step with such lightness, such tentativity (there is no such word, but there should be), that my foot can hit poo and rebound so quickly that not a speck of poo adheres to my sock. Perhaps over eons I could pass this adaptation on to my offspring, and womankind and pooing kittykind could live in ecological harmony.

But I don't have eons and the males in the household remain their primitive stomping selves. Oblivious to the squish and stink, they track kitty poo around the entire house and are utterly amazed when I point out the fecal footprints.  Do men never look down? Is there something in testosterone that prevents the neck from bending? Given this male intransigence and my own growing impatience with scraping cat poop out of the rugs, Menopausal Kitty's future as an indoor cat looks limited.

Which makes me a bit nervous. Now granted, I have yet to poop in odd places but I do find myself and my body doing the strangest things. How long, then, before I'm mewing pitifully on the back porch, wondering why no one will open the door and let me inside?

And suddenly I get the point of male obliviousness--this wonderful evolutionary adaptation, this remarkable means of ensuring ecological harmony between the male species and menopausal womankind.